Reserving Stock

When looking at their stock records, companies often want to know two different stock quantities for a product: the “quantity on hand” (what’s physically present), and the “available” (what hasn’t been reserved for another sale). This video shows how reserving stock for a sale that isn’t going to ship immediately.

Reserving stock

Video Transcription

Hi, this is Will Harvey of Finale Inventory. I’m gonna give the quick demonstration of reserving products so that you don’t accidentally sell them to somebody else before shipping them to the person that you initially sold them to. Cutting over here to the homepage of your Finale Inventory Account. If I go to View stock, I see the stock…the stock items counts for all of the products that I have. I’m going to filter this to those items that contain the word pie and I’ve got four products, blueberry, apple, custard and boysenberry pie type.  Here as an example. If you look at the open stock columns here and the case stock columns just to the right, you can see the both open stock and the case stock have two numbers. The QOH number stands for quantity on hand. Which is the number of items that you physically have in that storage location.

So if you went into the storage location and you counted them or did a stock take, that’s the number that you’d have.

Available is the number that you have that are not committed to a sale that hasn’t shipped yet. So you may have sold something, but if it hasn’t shipped, it’s still in the warehouse. But you don’t want to accidentally sell it to somebody else if you’ve already sold it to a first person. So these numbers can be different. If you look at them right now they’re the same. Four hundred fifty-four, 50, zero and 100 for my pies and I guess of the blueberry desserts. I also am keeping some cases of blueberry desserts and again for the cases the quantity on hand is the same as the available meaning nothing has been reserved.

Okay, let’s change the situation here. Let’s create a new sale with some blueberry pies and some apple pies. Let’s…5 blueberry pies and 10 apple pies. Save the sale. And now over here, if you notice on the right there’s a reserve button. So if I click on the reserve button for the blueberry pie and the apple pies, it is reserving stock for that product.

So even though I have not shipped it yet, it’s reserved to prevent accidentally selling it to somebody else. Having done that, if I go back to the homepage and go to my view stock, type in pie to filter it to just the pies. If I look at blueberry pie here, the numbers have changed. The quantity on hand is 454. That was the same as the number from last time, but the available quantity is for 449. The available has gone down by the five blueberry pies that I have reserved for that sale. Similarly, in the apple cakes’ case I have 50 of them in the warehouse, but only 40 of those 50 are available.

If I click on the little turning down the arrow on the left or the turning down triangle, it shows me the details. So for this apple pie, it says that in magazine one, which is the container that I’m keeping in, I have 50. But then for the sale that we just created, K1009, we have a reservation of minus 10. And so that’s how you can…at any point you want to drill into the details to see why the available number is less than the quantity on hand due to reserving stock.

Similarly, blueberry cakes also has details. And in the blueberry pie case, I have recorded different lots or batches of blueberry pies with different dates. So the details that make up the numbers here are actually more lines here in the table.

But that gives you the basic idea. If I ship that shipment, the quantity on hand will go down to 449 for the blueberry desserts. Just like the remaining available because those reserved items have just been shipped out the door. That’s what you’d expect. So that’s how you create reserve stock for products.

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